Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them

Oh don’t you worry, I verbally abuse most computers and software, regardless of their gender.

I'm very nice to Alexa, but my wife tears her a new one almost every day.

I was nice until it started to advertise "new features I might like" after every third thing I ask...

"Alexa - set an alarm for 8:00am tomorrow"

"Alarm set for 8:00am tomorrow morning. Would you like me set an..."

"Fucking no. ALEXA - shut up"

"... alarm for this time all week?"

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"Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes"

"5 minute timer set. Did you know you can give..."

"ALEXA! Shut the fuck up."

"...timers a name? Then you can refer to them by name."

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"Alexa, is it going to rain today?"

"There is a 30% chance of precipitation today. Would you like me to read..."

"Alexa.... no. please just stop talking."

"you the weather results for the rest of this week?"

The headline comes off as pretty strong and generalizing, while the actual article only states

"But it’s worth noting that chatbot abuse often has a gendered component. Although not exclusively, it seems that it’s often men creating a digital girlfriend, only to then punish her with words and simulated aggression."

But isn't our culture filled with much worse fantasy violence? What about the millions of digital Assassin's Creed NPCs brutally murdered by players?

I heard Assassin's Creed is quite popular with female gamers and has a female playable hero character. Should that be titled "Women spend hours murdering unarmed men in virtual reality"?

I feel like this article has willingly sacrificed a big part of its discussion potential just through its headline. Or maybe, this was never intended to be actually discussed.

The article mentions how the AI partners can also be verbally abusive themselves. I don't know how Replika works, but Cleverbot would take statistically appropriate responses it gathered from human interactions (leading it to often asking if you are human), so I wonder if the mistreatment by users contributes to it learning abuse. In any case, I see the harm in such AIs and it warrants monitoring. Once, in a moment of weakness, I asked GPT3 if I was a monster. Its answer could be summarized as "Yes, as evident from you asking. You monster." Now, I have some understanding of how it works, but even then it was still unpleasant. I could only imagine how it would feel for someone doing worse.